July 2004

Catching up on some news, emails, and links sent in over the past few weeks, I was amused to see that financially hard-hit homeowners in the Los Angeles area have begun temporarily renting out their houses as filming locations for TV commercials and pornos. One man in Burbank, unable to sell his house for its asking price and having to compensate for a loss of rental income, "posted an Internet notice that the property, which has an eight-person hot tub, was available to the adult-film industry, which he had heard pays as much as $5,000 a day. A few months ago, 'I probably would’ve said, "You want to do what in here?"' he said. 'That’s reserved for me and the missus.'"Apparently, "Income from residential filming for fewer than 15 days a year isn’t subject to federal taxes," so there might yet be something of a boom in short-term film sites around the city, a distributed micro-Hollywood of economically depressed domestic space.

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Leasing foreclosed homes as movie sets is an easy (LA-specific) redeployment of foreclosed housing stock. But how do we recuperate some of these overbuilt communities over the long term? One solution may be to explode the limitations on use by zoning and per HOA covenant.

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BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.